Quote Of Note From The CHNN B.S. Clean Up Desk

“At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified ‘reports’ that Park51 has ‘money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.’ As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $7 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.”

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“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as t’were, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

We need to set up literacy re-education camps along side the “mosques” right away.

Words fail me more and more, and Will always says it better anyway, but that quote goes to the heart of the the phenomenon of observable hypocrisy, from high to low and back again – yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Wouldn’t the Saudis have made better use of their money by buying Newsweek? Oh, maybe not. It is, after all, an investment, a hope that their funds will increase with the success of the business. Otherwise they could just put their riyals in a big pile, set them afire, and roast mutton over them. The idea of investment is foreign to you statist troglodytes, who believe that government is supposed to have all the money.

“Sweden’s economy would expand 4.5 percent this year, the government forecast on Friday – a pace of expansion rarely seen in Europe’s mature economies – and unemployment is falling; Sweden’s public finances make other European countries blush.”

~~~ snip ~~~

“The events of the past three years have only strengthened the case for a system in which politicians, businesses, and trade unions AGREE on the best ways to support long-term economic growth – and then stick to them. The past focus on strong public finances left lots of room for maneuver when crisis struck: the fiscal stimulus in Sweden was substantial relative to the country’s size. Companies, meanwhile, have worked consistently with trade unions to balance job security and wages, with the government providing a generous social security ‘safety net’ as a back-up.

“The result has been economic security – a valuable commodity at a time when Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve chairman, sees the US outlook as ‘unusually uncertain.’

“It is no coincidence that other ‘consensus-based’ economies – including Finland, the Netherlands and Austria within the eurozone – also fared well in the second quarter. Germany has also displayed Swedish-style characteristics. Berlin encouraged companies to retain, rather than fire, workers by subsidising short-time work schedules.

“Consensus-seeking is popping up in surprising places. In the UK, where traditionally politics is based on confrontation between two main parties, the continental European-style coalition government of David Cameron, prime minister, is seeking broad public support for a sweeping austerity package.”

… from The Consensus in Favor of Swedish Thinking
… by Ralph Atkins
… The Financial Times, 8/23/10

Makes me glad to see that a balance between personal greed and social responsibility, as practiced in most European countries (Germans call it “Soziale Marktwirtschaft” = social market economy), proves to be more stable in times of crisis. Actually not too surprising if you think about it.

But don’t you dare suggesting this here. Might as well suggest to worship Satan….

There were stories last year about how Sweden’s successful approach to a similar banking crisis in 1993 might work here.

There hasn’t been too much reporting on that that I know of, enough to give it traction on a policy level anyway, but then, anything the Swedes do is anathema to the right here.

Free sex, free medical care, and free death benefits. The infestation of Stieg Larrson novels. Young women, from New York, to LA, to San Francisco (or Liberal, Kansas) – gobbling them up. The collateral damage of the Lisbeth Salander character. It’s too much!

I can just imagine ten million Toms storming the White House gates over a perceived Swedification of the country. Forget the Muslims!